When Gilles Thevenin bought the historic, all-but-defunct perfume house of Lubin, a dozen years ago, he knew he was picking up a trail that led directly back to the doomed French queen Marie Antoinette. But he had no way of knowing that, 10 years on, he would come across the formula for the last fragrance she ever wore—and that her last vial of perfume still existed.

The Lubin story begins amid the French Revolution, when the young Pierre-François Lubin became an apprentice to Jean-Louis Fargeon—perfumer to the queen. In 1798, after the conflict, Lubin more or less picked up where his mentor left off, and his success was such that he went on to become the purveyor to Empress Josephine and assorted ladies of the court, as well as to the merveilleuses (courtesans and fashion icons of the day) andincroyables (their male counterparts). By the 1830s, Lubin had become the first French perfume house to export to the United States.

Things got more complicated by mid-19th century, when the heirless Lubin sold his company to a French family, who held onto it until the 1970s, at which point it changed hands among a series of multi-nationals, notably Sanofi, Henkel, and Wella.

Enter Thevenin, the former director of creation at Guerlain, who came across the name while leafing through backlists of Wella stock. He begged his bosses for a chance to resurrect the brand. “Here I was, looking at one of the oldest names in luxury in the world, and no one in the company was interested,” Thevenin recounts. At the time, the company’s focus was the launch of Gucci Envy, the first fragrance by Tom Ford. Every day for 15 months, Thevenin lobbied the Wella board for the right to purchase Lubin. At last he prevailed, and quit his job.

Perfume-lovers tend to be obsessive, and this goes doubly, triply, or even more so for Thevenin, whose love of history in general and perfumery in particular make him something of a walking encyclopedia. Even so, he hesitated. “There I was—broke and daunted. I felt a little enslaved by the brand,” he recounts. It was his friend and former boss Jean-Paul Guerlain who told him to pull it together. “He said that a pretty history is all well and good, but now I had to forget all that and do something from the gut.”

For his first launch, Idole, in collaboration with star nose Olivia Giacobetti, in 2005, Thevenin reached back to his youthful travels in Asia, when he roamed freely along the maritime spice route, dealing in antiques and reveling in the local markets. Then he started picking through the archives—a few boxes with some interesting pieces, but not enough, he says.

Gilles Thevenin

He worked with perfumer Thomas Fontaine, a specialist in recasting vintage formulas for modern times, to re-interpret more traceable, modern hits such as Gin Fizz, whose original 1955 formula was inspired by Grace Kelly. (There is no proof, but it’s been rumored for decades that Kelly was wearing the fragrance when she was officially proposed to by Prince Rainier of Monaco.)

Then, through luck and helpful connections, Thevenin was struck with a breakthrough. A perfumer who had started her career at Lubin in the 50s put him in touch with the house’s previous owners, who agreed to provide a copy of Lubin’s original formula books. In these relics, which Lubin began at the age of 10 and continued throughout his life, Thevenin came across a formula from the 1780s called Bouquet de la Reine (Queen’s Bouquet), dutifully re-copied, as per custom, by a loyal apprentice. “It’s a very short formula, but with a lot of personality,” he notes. “But the last thing I wanted to be known for was dusting off old formulas,” he said. “I wasn’t really sure what to do with it."

He mentioned the potential project to a friend of illustrious aristocratic stock. As it happens, she already knew the story: One of her ancestors, the Duchesse de Tourzel, had been lady in waiting to the queen and guardian of the dauphin. On the eve of her departure to the Conciergerie, the queen entrusted the duchess with her last vial of perfume, which she had worn around her neck. The duchess survived the revolution and, in her memoirs, spoke of the shiny black vial as a talisman. Over the generations, the family came to call it "jade noir," or black jade.

In its modern, spicy “floriental” incarnation, Black Jade associates two staples of the classic French garden—rose and jasmine—with spices found in French colonies of the day, such as cinnamon, incense, sandalwood, and patchouli.

While 230-odd years and three degrees of separation from the queen is quite a story, for Thevenin this aspect is actually less compelling than the object as a talisman, which today lies secreted away in a vault somewhere (he does not despair of seeing it one day). “The queen’s story was so dramatic and upsetting—we French are not so comfortable with that,” he points out. “But the fact that the talisman brought good luck to someone gives it a hopeful note.”

Black Jade by Lubin is now available at Aedes de Venustas and Min New York, N.Y.C. For other locations nationwide, e-mail contact@lubinparis.com, or call 404-467-4319 for stores nearest you.

See below for a slideshow of Lubin Paris, current photographs by Xavier Granet.

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The Cannes Lubin factory in the 1920s. It was closed in 1930, owing to the U.S. Great Depression (Lubin was very dependent on the American market). The Cannes factory produced raw materials extracted from flowers, and the workers shown are sorting out the petals.

The Rue Royale boutique when it was opened, in 1897. The furniture is 18th-century-style, a reminder of French royalty.

The Lubin boutique at 11 Rue Royale (it has since become the Bernardard boutique), photographed in the early 1950s.